By Rob Schabert, Assistant Athletic Director for Sports Information

NOTE: Saturday is Military and Public Safety Appreciation Night at Tucker Stadium. We take this opportunity to tell the story of Jacob Buttram, a member of the Golden Eagle football team who delayed his college career to join the Marines and serve our country.

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. -- Jacob Buttram is a defensive end on the Tennessee Tech football team. He stands 6-foot-2, weighs 250 pounds, and comes from Huntsville, Tenn. That much you can find out by looking at the Golden Eagle roster.
   
And if you stop reading right there, you will miss the entire story.

"I was in the eighth grade when he was a senior in 2003," Jacob explains about Rusty Washam, a standout football player at Scott County High School.
   
"When I was a freshman, he joined the Marine Corps right out of high school, and my sophomore year the Marine recruiter started talking to me about joining."
     
On February 14, 2006, Washam was killed in action while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
     
"I was a junior in high school. He had always come back and talked about how proud he was to be a Marine. He came back home, and actually volunteered to go back to Iraq," Buttram recalls.
     
"The whole team went to his funeral. It was sad, very sad, but it was pretty amazing how the while county came together for his funeral."
     
Jacob and three of his high school teammates, three cousins from the tiny town of Robbins, talked to the recruiter about the Marines.
      
"We all talked to the same recruiter, Todd Garris, and all four of us decided that college could wait."
    
Jacob Buttram, along with Josey and Lucas Chambers, and Steven Kries, all joined the Marines out of high school. One of the factors in their decision was the memory of Rusty Washam.

Jacob Buttram is the oldest player on the Tennessee Tech roster at 25 years old. He spent one season on the roster working in the weight room and learning the systems of coach Watson Brown.
     
This season, he is ready to play but has yet to see any action.

Jacob was 18 years old when he joined the Marines, the first from his family to serve in the military. His brother, Josh, has since joined the Air Force.
     
"It wasn't too difficult," he says about informing his parents of his life-changing decision. "They knew how I was. If I say I'm going to do something, I do it."
 
And so, he did. He signed on with the U.S. Marine Corps and reported to Paris Island on October 13, 2007. He spent three month in boot camp, graduating on January 9, 2009, and moving on to Marine Combat Training at Camp Geiger in Jacksonville, N.C.
      
"It was much more hands-on," Buttram recalls. "Boot camp was designed to mentally break you down and teach you to do things the Marine way. Combat Training was to teach us maneuvers and weapons and train us for combat."
      
Next on the agenda was Fort Knox where he attended Tank School for three months.

      
"You get distributed to your job, and my first was as a tank operator," he says. "They taught me to be a mechanic, to load it, to drive it, to fire it."
     
And from there, he was assigned to the 2nd Tank Battalion, Alpha Company, at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
      
"I thought I'd be with tanks for awhile, but one day they came to us and told us that the 2nd Combat Engineers needed volunteers. A few of us did that. We knew it was one of the most dangerous jobs. It was basically infantry."
      
Jacob was assigned to the Route Clearance Plattoon 2, a group of Marines whose job it is to clear IED's (Improvised Explosive Device).
      
"We trained for one year before we went. We'd be practicing sweeping for IEDs and sometimes you'd hear a noise or see a puff of powder, and you realized if this wasn't training, if this was actually in a combat situation, it would have fired.
      
"I realized that I might be an amputee, or I might be dead."
      
That's a frightening thought.
      
"It's about 90 percent adrenaline and excitement, and about 10 percent scared," Jacob said. "We learned to take the fight to them."

In April of 2011 – about the time the Golden Eagle football team was in the midst of spring drills preparing for what would be an OVC championship season – Jacob Buttram was deployed to Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan, where he would serve in the Sangin Valley. It's considered the most kinetic place in Afghanistan.
     
"There was no such thing as a typical day," he says. "They were always different. One day we might be chillin' and the next day we're out looking for IEDs. We had to keep our mind sharp all the time."
       
As Buttram explains, there was no running water, they are MREs (Meal Ready to Eat), took bottled water showers, and went to the bathroom into trach bags.
     
"They told us to always be prepared," he says.
      
Those meals weren't the most effective way to stay nourished, but they had to do.
     
"We had about 24 different meals to choose from," he explains. "My favorite was beef stew. The worst was the veggie omelet. It was actually awful."
     
Buttram and his platoon worked two or three weeks, then had two or three days off.
     
"We never lost anyone when I was there," he says. "We had the best platoon in the Company. We found more IEDs than any other platoon."         
     
He was in Afghanistan through October of 2011 – about the time the Golden Eagle football team was in the middle of a season that would bring the OVC championship trophy to Cookeville.
     
"We knew when we were coming back, and it got a little tough the last couple of weeks," he recalls. "We went out on night routes, and we drove through the night. When we were all finished, we traded off our stuff to the platoon replacing us and headed out.
      
He arrived back home on October 31, 2011 – Halloween Night. He began his leave, and that night a man was shot in his hometown.

He spent his final year in the Marines back working with tanks, and was out on September 22, 2012.
      
"If they would have asked, I would have gone back," he says. "I loved it. You don't think about the danger. You're just fighting for the guy on your left and the guys on your right, and you know they will do everything they can to bring you home. That's what we're trained for."

"I thought I would try out college," he explains, going to nearby Roane State Community College for one semester to secure the credits needed to enroll at Tennessee Tech. He started at Tech in the fall of 2013, beginning work toward a degree in Exercise Science, Physical Education and Wellness (EXPW), with a goal of becoming a Strength and Conditioning Coach.
    
"I think he will make a good strength coach," says Casey Kramer, the Director of Tech's Athletic Performance Center. "He pays great attention to detail. He gets everything right down to the inch and he has a great work ethic. You only have to tell him once and he will do it, and do it right. He is diligent in everything he does.
     
"Once he learns the ins and outs of the program and the science," I think he'll make a very good coach. "He has had to work for every thing. Every inch he's gained, he's had to work for."

Jacob first joined the Golden Eagle football program for the 2014-15 season, working out in the Athletic Performance Center as a walk-on and spending time on the scout team.
     
This season he is prepared if he's called upon at defensive end. In the meantime, he continues to provide the mature leadership that comes from his experience as a Marine.
      
"This past summer, when it was pretty hot and some of the guys were huffing and puffing, I tried to remind them that football is fun. Sure it was hard and hot, but it could be a lot worse."
     
Kramer saw that commitment on the hot turf of Overall Field.
      
"He was valuable to the team during the summer because of how hard he trained in the workouts and his general attitude. He's here because he want s to be here. He works hard because he wants to. That rubs off on the other guys. His consistency in his positive attitude adds to the team. He's a hard-working guy who's always going to do things right."
     
That positive attitude comes from Buttram enjoying an opportunity that many of his fellow Marines may never have.
    
"When I was in, we all talked about someday having a chance to play college football, but it's not something that's going to happen for most of them," he says.
     
"This is the same kind of camaraderie," he said.

Jacob is on schedule to graduate in May 2016, and plans to stay at Tech to add a master's degree.
     
Whether he sees playing time or spends his time on the Golden Eagle football team on the sidelines, he will always be looked to for leadership.
     
"It was a very humbling experience last year at Military Appreciation Day," Buttram recalls. "Coach Brown asked the entire team to thank me for my service. I told the team that if they have family members who are veterans, they needed to call them and thank them."